Google Teaching Hadoop

The goal of this initiative is to improve computer science students' knowledge of highly parallel computing practices to better address the emerging paradigm of large-scale distributed computing. IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons. With their combined resources, the companies hope to lower the financial and logistical barriers for the academic community to explore this emerging model of computing.

Fantastic! The world needs more people who know how to design, build, and deploy large grid computing systems.

For this project, the two companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache's Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).

I think the storage issue has become a non-issue since Yahoo! Mail announced unlimited storage. Well in a sense is has been a non-issue for be because when my GMail account started to reach it's limit I just started a new account. Not very efficient or convenient but free storage is free storage.

on October 18, 2007 11:16 AM

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are mine and
mine alone. My current, past, or previous employers are not responsible for what I
write here, the comments left by others, or the photos I may share. If
you have questions, please contact
me. Also, I am not a journalist or reporter. Don't "pitch" me.

Privacy: I do not share or publish the email addresses
or IP addresses of anyone posting a comment here without consent.
However, I do reserve the right to remove comments that are spammy,
off-topic, or otherwise unsuitable based on my comment
policy. In a few cases, I may leave spammy comments but remove any
URLs they contain.